BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • What’s Next for Apple and Amazon?

    The world’s most valuable company won’t buy Disney anytime soon, but there’s a giant caveat. Plus, what else will the ecommerce giant do with Amazon One, its new biometric payment platform? Being a futurist can be glum when other writers breathlessly announce new-to-them ideas that I’ve been talking about for years while missing the broader…

  • The Hollywood Strikes, AI, Strategy, & Overfocusing

    The organization on the other side of the negotiating table from the striking writers and actors is the AMPTP, but how can one organization represent studios with such divergent interests? The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) is a mysterious Hollywood trade association. Its website contains no list of member organizations: just some technical documents,…

  • The Real Social Media

    The algorithmic rabbit holes of Facebook, Instagram, and Snap can isolate us, but could we use both today’s and tomorrow’s digital technologies to connect In Real Life (IRL)? Both in its etymology and our common practice “social media” is oxymoronic, like “jumbo shrimp.” The Latin root socius means ally (or similar words like comrade) and is a shared…

  • Digital Transformation: Three Stories

    The ingredients for Digital Transformation are institutional pain, inflection points, and tools lying around, but you also have to get the people part right. Usually, when we talk about Digital Transformation, we focus on the physical: paper and ink newspapers dissolve and go online; albums become cassettes then CDs then MP3s then streams; physical books…

  • Adapt-amnesia, and why it matters

    [Note: I wrote this piece back in November of 2017, but it only appeared on the Center site, not here. Since this is still something I think about, I’m adding it here, albeit belatedly.] We’re the most adaptable species on the planet, but then we forget that we adapted. That’s bad news for incumbent businesses…

  • Keyword: Overfocusing

    The Hollywood strikes versus what makes experiences special in the first place. This is the third piece in my keywords thread, but you don’t need to read anything else to understand this one. Bad products can yield positive experiences, but we don’t have useful tools to describe the difference because we tend to focus more on products…

  • The Monster in My Ear

    How an aural invasion led to a meditation on what makes experiences memorable. What are the ingredients for a memorable experience? One recent event has some clues. My scintillating compadre in nerdery, Benjamin Karney, and I have been friends since we were eight. A few days ago, we had a chance to catch up while he…

  • AI, SCOTUS, and Affirmative Action

    Colliding Trends: as the Supreme Court changed college admissions, Chief Justice Roberts argued that personal essays will be more important, but are applicants learning to write in the age of ChatGPT? When I give sharpest-edge trend keynotes, I often use the phrase “colliding trends” to describe how I approach peering into the future. As a…

  • Apple’s Vision Pro: What Will it Take to Go Big?

    The newest product from the world’s most valuable company will transform the world, but not for quite some time. I’ve been hesitant to write about Apple’s new “spatial computing” device: the thing that the world’s most valuable company doesn’t want to call an Augmented Reality (AR) headset. However, since there are things that I haven’t seen…

  • “The Flash” doesn’t suck!

    The bad press around WBD’s new superhero action movie misses the real reason why the movie isn’t doing boffo box office. My son and I caught The Flash in IMAX on Father’s Day. It was fun! If you like popcorn movies and have any affection for the character, go see it… while you can. The most telling…